Drawings on Writing

As we spend our days increasingly glued to our computers and handheld devices, rapidly tapping keywords into Google, cutting and pasting Word docs and texting urgently truncated messages, it is becoming increasingly rare to pen anything by hand. No wonder hand-written fonts are all the rage in the world of graphic design. Writing, like drawing, has become an endangered act. Drawings on Text–which explores the idea that when a hand-written note is illegible, it becomes a drawing–is the third book in this series, edited by Dutch artist Serge Onnen. The handwritten can take many forms, from an illegibly scrawled letter to initials carved into a tree with a knife. A catholic selection of the hand-written-as-drawing is included in this innovative volume, which was first published in Zing magazine. Included are pieces by John Cage, Napoleon Bonaparte, Olav Westphalen, Roland Barthes, Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo, among others.